Participatory sporting events, such as basketball or volleyball games, camps, leagues, etc. typically have one or more restrictions on the type of person allowed to participate in the event, such as only females, or only twelve year-olds. Similarly, potential participants often have their own criteria for participating in events, such as date of the event, location of the event, costs of the event, etc. As event organizers compete with one another for participants, it can be difficult to find a single source to simultaneously search multiple events, using user-defined criteria. It would therefore be desirable to provide a method to allow a participant to search participatory sporting events from several event organizers at once.
Typical search systems for participatory sporting events require participants to return to multiple individual websites over and over, to continuously search for updates regarding participatory sporting events. As such events can become sold out between the times a participant has visited multiple individual websites to perform a search, if a participant wants to ensure registration for a particular event prior to it being sold out, the participant must return to multiple individual websites numerous times to check for new events. It would therefore be desirable to provide an alert system whereby a participant is automatically alerted to new events matching the participants' pre-defined criteria.
As sporting events are often put on by several different event organizers, these event organizers can all have their own particular criteria associated with a particular event. As some event organizers assume that people searching for participatory sporting events on the event organizers webpage already know the requirements of the event organizer, some search criteria critical to a participant may be omitted all together by the event organizer. Additionally, while event organizers all list some information about a proposed sporting event, it would be desirable to provide a method for searching several participatory sporting events offered by several event organizers using a standard set of participant search criteria.